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The show begins. The Jon Snow kid I’ve heard about for years walks onto the screen and I frown.
“He doesn’t seem like star material to me,” I tell Beck. “I’d assume he was gonna get killed off in the first episode if I didn’t know better.”
“Watch the show,” Beck says.
A few minutes later, a kid runs across the screen. “That’s Bran?” I ask. “I thought he was, like, paralyzed or something.”
Beck places his hand over my mouth. “Watch. The. Show.”
I’d rather not. So far, it’s just a whole lot of knowing glances and treachery,blah, blah, blah.
Beck’s just put his hand down again when Khal Drogo comes onto the screen. Khal Drogo, who reminds me alotof Beck. There are similarities in their coloring, but it’s more that they are both huge and commanding, two qualities I seriously appreciate in a man. Caleb has those things too, but it’s different in him. Caleb’s command is all suave, Ivy League charm—a boulder polished until it gleams like a gem. Beck and his doppelgänger have a roughness to them, sharp edges they’d never allow you to erase.
“You think he’s hot, don’t you?” Beck asks, glancing over at me.
I narrow my eyes at him. “Oh,nowit’s okay to talk? Just because he looks like you?”
His eyes return to the screen and one brow raises. “I don’t look like that guy. He’s wearing eyeliner, for Christ’s sake.”
“Warrior kings have to wear eyeliner. That’s just history, dude.”
There’s the start of a smirk on Beck’s face. “So you think that guy, who apparently looks like me, is hot.”
I roll my eyes. “Ididn’t say I thought he was hot.Yousaid that.”
“Well, do you?” he persists.
I glare at him. “I lost my husband, not my vision. Of course he is. What’s your point?”
“That you are capable of wanting something other than Caleb.”
The mere suggestion starts that panic in my chest swirling. Even considering someone else means shutting the door on the one thing that got me clean.
I force a laugh. “Are you offering, Beck? Me and Audrey are about the only girls in the state you haven’t slept with, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
He smirks. “I’m not offering. You’re okay-looking, but you’re way too much trouble.”
I round on him, the show forgotten entirely. “Okay-looking? Did you really just call meokay-looking?” I know my flaws, but my freaking looks have never been among them.
He fights a smile. “You’re a solid five. Maybe a six with makeup.”
I dig my toes into his thigh as hard as I can. “Fuck you.”
This makes him laugh, a real laugh, and for a moment his face is transformed. He’s been through nearly as much shit as I have, and in this half-second I see who he might have been before his life fell apart. “Shut up,” he says. “You know you’re hot. Too skinny for me, but you’re hot.”
We’ve been joking until now, but that last bit cuts so deep I’m impaled by it. I jerk my gaze back to the TV, seeing nothing.
“You know I was fucking with you,” he says.
“What, about the skinny part?” I ask quietly. Because Lucie is not skinny. Lucie is all curves, all tits and ass like a reality TV star. She’s never worn a padded bra in her life, and after these days spent wondering what she has that I don’t, I’ve latched onto this like a life raft—abarbedlife raft that’s intensely painful to cling to.
He pauses the show. “Kate,” he groans, waiting until I look at him, “I’m going to say this once and then we are never going to discuss it again. The first time I saw you, I thought you were the most perfect thing I’d ever seen, and I still think it. I wouldn’t change a single thing about you. Now shut the fuck up and watch the show.”
He turns back to the TV, where yet another couple is having sex, a couple I believe might be siblings, and even that barely gets my attention.
You were the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.
We’ve never addressed that night. We’ve never even alluded to it until now. But when I saw Beck from a distance, before I knew he was Caleb’s friend, I thought he was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen too.
